ed we regard as the very type of spiritual
existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute contradiction to that
human spirituality in which Carlyle believed that a man should be owned
like a tool for someone else's good, as if he had no personal destiny
in the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular error of Carlyle's
because we think that it is a curious example of the waste and unclean
places into which that remarkable animal, 'the whole hog,' more than
once led him.

In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and an
unquestionably bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethic
which conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for
once and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberately
deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example.
Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern
times the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency. Though
Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle
being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat,
they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and
pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to
everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed,
embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges
himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with
which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as
a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient
necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it
can hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual courage brought many at
last.

TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY

The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, not
deliberately, but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of false
innocence, like that of the French aristocrats before the Revolution,
who built an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peasantry for the enormous
expenditure which is needed in order to live the simple life of
peasants. The simplicity towards which the world is driving is the
necessary outcome of all our systems and speculations and of our deep
and continuous contemplation of things. For the universe is like
everything in it; we have to look at it repeatedly and habitually before
we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth ti